5 Tools We Love to Use with ActiveCampaign

This post was contributed by Identify Marketing, ActiveCampaign Certified Consultants.

As a marketing agency, we’re always looking for easier and more effective ways to connect with leads, and our clients better. Plus we love experimenting with new tools, testing them out so we can recommend them to our clients.

Along with ActiveCampaign, we use a variety of tools to help us build an engaged funnel and grow our agency.

We’re very conscious about adding a pile of tools that look great but don’t really add to the day to day operations of a business. It’s very easy to see those monthly charges creep up in the outgoings column!

So here’s our top five tried and true favorite tools.

1. Bonjoro

It’s an unwritten rule to save the best for last, but I love this tool so much that I need to start with it!

Bonjoro is an Australian-designed app and a highly effective tool to connect with someone at any point of the sales or client process. (Except that odd, unhappy client. They probably wouldn’t enjoy it!)

Bonjoro lets you record and send a short, personalized video to anyone within the app. You can customize the email with your own logo, create a specific call to action, and add a text message.

The feedback we’ve had from using Bonjoro is amazing! I use it to welcome anyone who signs up to my coaching email series, to introduce myself to anyone who has set a meeting or emailed us through our website, and to send off the cuff emails to clients who’ve had a recent win.

It’s magic because it’s personal.

You can connect Bonjoro with Active Campaign to get notifications of any new contact, or connect it to a trackable action (you will need Zapier for this).

2. Hotjar

Sometimes, the love of a pretty layout overrides the need to make sure a web page is laid out in the best way to help conversions.

That’s where Hotjar comes in.

Hotjar creates a heatmap showing you where visitors fall off the page. It also shows the most common “click” spots, helping you determine where to place call to actions and how to reorganize the page to convert better.

But its real gem? The videos of every visitor’s actions on your website.

In the videos, you can see every visitor’s scroll, every cursor movement, and each click. (contact details and name of the person remain private).

Here’s a few things we’ve discovered for clients using Hotjar (that we wouldn’t have known otherwise)

1. There was a speed issue with a website, and the buy now button didn’t load fast enough.
2. One of the contact forms didn’t go anywhere
3. People wanted to click a decorative button for more information
4. The landing page designed to convert didn’t have the call to action in the right place
5. The high value of abandoned carts in an ecommerce store was due to a high shipping charge

3. Calendly

The secret of effective sales is keeping the control. The next secret of sales is allowing the person you are selling to feel they are in control.

Calendly helps your leads and clients make appointments with you at a time that suits both you and them. It syncs with your calendar (365 or Gmail), so if you’ve got a day blocked out it it won’t show that as a free spot.

When we first started using Calendly, it reduced my “setting meetings up” time by over six hours a week!

We then created a Facebook advertisement that offered free fifteen minute meetings—scheduled automatically. It was so successful that we had to turn it off after two weeks, because I couldn’t keep up with the incoming leads!

You can link your Calendly page to your about us or contact page, or add it to an automation so that contacts are emailed after specific actions.

We use it to offer a booked phone meeting time to every person who contacts us through our website. We also use it to book in strategy meetings with existing clients.

4. SnagIt

Here’s a super simple tool we love to us as an agency—and pass on to many of our clients.

Snagit is a TechSmith tool that helps you create screen record videos. We use it extensively to record simple, customized training videos for all our ActiveCampaign and marketing clients.

The tool makes it super easy to record. You don’t need anything beyond the program, a screen, and your voice.

We’re a big believers in building systems for any repeat processes. That’s one of the reasons we love ActiveCampaign—it’s not just an awesome marketing and sales tool, but one that helps improve on administration and business systems.

If you’re doing something that a member of your team could do instead, record yourself doing it and talking through it, and pass it on. It’s the fastest way to train your team—and once it’s made, it can train any number of people.

5. Proposify

Effective proposals still help us seal the deal.

Even if you use email to send informal proposals, official proposals ensure that the client has a clear and full idea of your terms and conditions, the people who will be working with them, and a detailed breakdown of what to expect.

I used to create our proposals as a Word Doc. It had so much formatting and extra bits in it that I was forever trying to squeeze information in the wrong places, and forgetting to delete sections.

We researched for months before selecting Proposify for our proposals.

Part of the attraction was the ability to make truly beautiful proposals. My favorite part, however, is the complete visibility of when the proposal has been read, and which parts the client is focussing on.

From this we can see how engaged they are with the proposal, and which parts they might be stuck on. To be honest, I’m a little addicted!

Setting it up right does take time, but it’s truly worth it. You can sync Proposify to ActiveCampaign with Zapier, but we prefer to keep the two separate, and separate the aspects of the proposal into separate sales in Deals—as often clients start with just a portion of the work proposed initially.

If you’ve got a small to medium sized business selling services, all of these tools can help add to your sales and marketing toolkit—to help you become more effective and more profitable.

Rachel Klaver is the CEO (Chief Excitement Officer) of Identify Marketing, a marketing agency for small to medium sized businesses. Based in New Zealand, Identify are ActiveCampaign consultants, who integrate it with their work in overall marketing strategy, developing WordPress websites, Facebook funnels, and more.